AIG: America Is Godforsaken

“Bankrupts, hold fast; rather than render back, out with your knives, and cut your trusters’ throats.”
- Shakespeare, Timon of Athens

Having grown up in what I call the State Farm mafia, I am not in the least surprised by how AIG is laughing all the way to the banks they’ve busted. The insurance industry is a con game at the individual level; imagine what it is with the biggest banks in the world.

When I was young, all three of my younger sisters, or their husbands, went to work for State Farm Insurance. A few years after the young husband of my oldest sister got a job at the behest of my father selling insurance in my home town, he made a statement that he thought would surprise me.

“There would be a revolution in this country if people knew how much State Farm agents made,” he said. Since I knew how much they made, the only thing that surprised me is that he thought there would be a revolution if it were widely known.

The American character was consciously forged by a view of human nature that has two primary aspects: the driving factor of self-aggrandizement, and the restraining factor of reason. Of course, reason and restraint have always played catch-up to self-aggrandizement (or, more accurately, greed, envy, and covetousness).

Only when the gap between the obscenely rich and the envious classes grew intolerably wide, as it has in the last two decades, has the social contract been threatened.

Seeing the racket from the inside, I would rather have been a janitor, and was in my early years. It was honest work, and gave me plenty of time to do philosophy and write.

Once I was changing light bulbs on the top floor of the biggest bank in town. The president of the bank, who was acquainted with my family, called me into his office, and told me to shut the door. “What are you doing?” he asked. Pretending to be obtuse, I said “changing light bulbs.”

“No, I mean working as a janitor. You could do anything you want; you could be in business, making a lot of money.” I was still in my 20’s, and my answer contained a little of the pride of rebellious youth, but it still holds.

“What is the purpose of all this wealth, just to make more money? Why should I join the rat race of this rotten society, rather than become a philosopher and writer, and perhaps contribute something to humanity?”

Needless to say, he dismissed me without another word. I was clearly a totally lost cause. And where America’s pathologically outward drive for success was concerned (what Walt Whitman called our “almost maniacal appetite for wealth”), he was right.

My father once said to me, “You can’t swim against the current all your life.” But I saw what the world was at a young age, and that it broke nearly everyone. Better to be broken going against the current than be broken swimming with it, I felt. So I said, “Perhaps you can if you get out and rest on the bank when you’re tired.” And that’s what I’ve done.

Now the country and culture are broken, and although I still have no place in it, there is an open field for people like me, the few that are still left standing that is. My father has lived long enough for me to understand him while he’s still alive, and for him to see that I was right.

He’s old enough to remember the Great Depression, but sees no parallels with it in this crisis. To a large degree, our views have converged. To my surprise he voted for Obama, but he sees him as a politician, not our redeemer.

The same brother-in-law (who has become a rabid Rush Limbaugh fan over the last 15 years) once chastised me after an argument with my father. “You’ll kill him,” my brother-in-law said, voicing a basic American attitude--that there is no choice but to go on living by lies, because we have done so for so long.

Americans are being fed another lie—that the present economic crisis is simply a cycle, at worst a replay of the Great Depression. And now we supposedly have a new Roosevelt at the helm, reassuring us that the crisis is “not as bad as we think.”

All economics are ultimately psychological, but there has never been a depression in the history of capitalism that’s been as psychological as this one. It’s beginning to dawn on people that the drive for outward success--for wealth and power--is inversely proportional to inward development and contentment.

The American-based and triggered crisis of capitalism is global. Economics is not what lies below, or above however; it is what lies between man and nature. As such, the global economic collapse is a symptom of the ecological and spiritual crisis of humankind.

Many, such as the ubiquitous David Brooks, delude themselves that this is but a pause in America’s long march toward material nirvana. “The pendulum will swing [back] hard, and the gospel of success will recapture the imagination.”

But the pendulum has broken, and there will be no return. Most Americans know that all the trillions of stimulus dollars, and all the armadas of nuclear-armed carriers, can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net . The author welcomes comments.

© Scoop Media